The present invention relates to a storage device band control apparatus, a band control program and its method and in particular, to a technique for communication band control of a network including a storage device and a plurality of information apparatuses utilizing the storage device.
Conventionally, there is a band control technique for realizing band guarantee in a network communication.
Normally, when performing the band control, a network manager specifies information for guaranteeing the network communication band such as a particular traffic threshold value and an inter-packet communication priority to a switch controlling the network connection relationship and a network repeater apparatus such as a hub, so that the network repeater apparatus performs scheduling of a packet to be transmitted and a limit of communication amount by discarding a particular packet in accordance with the specified band guarantee requirement information and a monitor result.
It should be noted that it is also possible to perform the network communication band control by that the communication packet itself includes the aforementioned band guarantee requirement information.
On the other hand, recently, with improvement of the network performance and increase of the data size used by various applications, there arises a product and technique that a large-size storage device is directly connected to a network such as SAN (storage area network) so as to be used as a storage region. A storage device connected to the network normally consists of network I/F ports which are connectors with the network and a disc volume group as a storage region connected to the ports. The ports and the disc volumes can be freely configured as multiple ports against multiple disc volumes.
The aforementioned band control for the network is to perform band guarantee in accordance with the communication traffic and the information device connection relationships in the network, and not to realize the band guarantee in accordance with the internal configuration of the information device in the network and the performance value measured in the network. On the other hand, in the storage device, each of the ports and each of the disc volumes also have a performance limit as a processing capability.
Accordingly, due to a bottle neck generated by the performance limit of the storage device or the components in the storage device, there is a case that the network communication band cannot be guaranteed.